Researcher Portraits
The Sound Environment Centre brings together a diverse network of researchers across Lund University whose work touches on sound and sound environments. Their research, spanning multiple disciplines, contributes to and enriches the Centre’s mission to understand and raise awareness of the role of sound in our everyday lives.
Robert Willim
Robert Willim is associate professor of Ethnology and senior lecturer in Digital Cultures at Lund University. He also works as an artist. This positions his practice in the intersection between art and research, and in his work, he often experiments with different forms of expression involving everything from electronic music performances and video essays to mixed media works. Lately, he has used the concept Mundania to examine the ways emerging technologies are entwined with people’s everyday life and how technological imaginaries unfold.
He has a long experience of mixing research and artistic practice, and different uses of sound has been fundamental for his work. When performing as an artist, he uses sound and often video, and his work is interspersed with concepts, questions and ideas from his research. One example is the voice and electronic music performance Fields of Unknowing (recorded at the festival Intonal in Malmö 2024. Willim has been involved in the Sound Environment Centre for a long time, as a researcher, artist and as a member of the board.
Enrico Ronchi
This first portrait focuses on Enrico Ronchi, Associate Professor in evacuation modelling at Lund University, whose interdisciplinary work spans human behaviour and safety research. Enrico does research on inclusive evacuation design and studies of human responses in complex environments. In his ongoing projects, Ronchi applies innovative methods such as virtual reality and data‑driven modelling to better understand how people interact with and respond to their surroundings. His research is highly relevant to the Sound Environment Centre, as it sheds light on how humans perceive and react to sound in different environments, to develop the design of safer and more comfortable acoustic spaces.
In 2022, Ronchi was awarded incentive funding from the Sound Environment Centre to write a research application for research on tactile alarms for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. In 2024, he was awarded the prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant. Within the ERC project Egressibility, he is building an interdisciplinary team to conduct a large-scale collection of behavioural data and uses these data to develop an inclusive machine learning model (following ethical AI principles) that can transform evacuation design through the so-called egressibility concept. Among other approaches, multi-sensory Virtual Reality (VR) experiments will be carried out at Helsingborg Safety Hub to study human behaviour under various emergency evacuation scenarios.
Meet researchers affiliated with the Sound Environment Centre at Lund University through this series of video portraits. In these films, they share insights into their research on sound and sound environments.
Stay tuned for upcoming video portraits featuring more researchers and their contributions to advancing our understanding of sound and sound environments.